


Letters of Loss

by CabbageCommander



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Anthology, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Letters, No Plot/Plotless, No idea where this is going, Not Beta Read, Writing as a coping mechanism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:41:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23845399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CabbageCommander/pseuds/CabbageCommander
Summary: An exploration of grief.
Kudos: 1





	1. Letter 1: An Introduction of Sorts or Probably Not

**Author's Note:**

> This will be the only authors note, unless I feel the need to add content warnings to future chapters. There's no real rhyme or reason to the chapter order or a plot to speak of. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, though I know original works probably won't net the same reader turn out as fanfics.
> 
> As always:  
> On with the show!

Letter 1

I decided to write you a letter today. I remember watching you write them all the time. You would focus so intently. Take off your glasses and set them aside. Your blue-grey eyes would scrunch as you’d write and rewrite. Even when you had a computer, you only ever wrote your letters with pen, imprinting the page with your personal font. Somewhere between cursive and print, never one or the other, as erratic with the selection of letters as you were with your moods sometimes.

I kid, of course.

About your moods not the letters.

I loved watching you write them. I never knew who you were writing to. Have I ever told you how I always hoped you would write me one? No.

Probably not.

I never told you a lot of things I should have, but I suppose that’s what this letter will be about. A conversation between us. Or better to say a monologue in your direction that you can choose to answer or not.

Probably not.

I will strive to keep my thoughts chronological if only for logic’s sake, but logic has never suited us, has it? Logic would say don’t write to the dead they cannot respond, but logic would also say that we should want to be alive. So, here we are. Two illogical beings, the pair of us. The way it’s always been. I do not know where this letter will go really. At this point, I am putting my heart to the page to tell you all the things I should have and hoping it will lead to a point before it stops beating altogether.

This is not a side of me I think you’ve ever seen. Which is telling. You have seen so many of my sides. You knew me better than I knew myself, and yet I don’t think I ever let you see me write. Well. This is not the sort of writing I normally do, I’m not usto it. This is not fiction, and we are not characters invented by some unknown creator to be built in ink and paper for the sake of a lesson or three.

Or are we?

You believed in God once. Did it last?

I’m still not sure myself, although the Bible you gave me always seems to find its way to my coffee table unbidden when I need guidance.

Is that you or the Old Man I wonder? You’ll have to tell me someday. Or,

Probably not.


	2. Letter 2: The You In My Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How to describe you to you.

Letter 2

I suppose I don’t need to describe you to you. You knew who you were. Or did you? If you knew how much you would change the lives of people you would never know would you have ended it? Or maybe that’s exactly the reason you did it. You knew you were so much more than where you were, and no one else saw it?

I saw it.

Or maybe I didn’t. But I certainly saw something.

I saw the sun in your blonde hair. The sky in your blue eyes. Or maybe I just saw them framing you like my personal vision of a guardian angel come to earth each time I had to look up to see your face. I loved when you laughed. How you would close your eyes and despite how self-conscious you were about your broken teeth your smile would be anything but broken to me.

I wish there were more pictures of those smiles. More recordings of that laugh. I hunt through countless home videos searching for your voice if only so I don’t forget its timbre. When I tell people about you, I have to hunt through scores of photos for ones that show you. The one who is all broken teeth and full body smiles.

I envy that you were the nostalgic one. Because of you there will be generations sick of seeing memories of me, but there are so few of you.

Is this burning pit in my stomach that hungers for any piece of you to quell my loneliness how you felt?

Is that why you kept so many pieces of the ones you loved to surround you?

Were they any comfort in the end?


	3. Letter 3: Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do dreams have meaning?

Letter 3

I had a dream about you once. Actually, I’ve had about a dozen dreams about you since.

I had a dream that I went home for Thanksgiving and you were there and no one said anything. I was the only one who seemed to know you shouldn’t have been there. I called you out on it, I was so angry. I wanted to know why you’d put me through all that grief and just show back up like it was nothing. You shrugged and said it was something you needed to do. You weren’t happy about it; it was just something that had to be done for you to move on.

To what? From what?

I had another dream where I was home and you were there and I was so happy and relieved, and thought I had imagined it all. But every time I’d leave the room, and lose sight of you it would all come rushing back and I’d panic and go running back and there you’d be. I told you about it and you just smiled at me all sad, knowing eyes and tell me not to worry. I looked over my shoulder as I left the room again and you were crying and not watching me. Then I left and it all came back again.

I didn’t go back this time. I left the house altogether.

In another dream I was playing a videogame on a handheld console. It was one of those ones that your choices change the outcomes. I was home and you were there, and we were just hanging out. I noticed you’d watch me play and sometimes I’d make a choice and you’d get sad and leave the room, and then _it_ would happen again. Always in a different way.

The dream would restart and the game would ask me to save so I would. Then I’d go around the house and get rid of whatever you used last time. I’d sit and talk to you. Use different words. Hug you a second longer. Push when you’d refuse to answer a question. Then I’d keep playing when I thought it was ok. Then it would happen again.

I started to think maybe if I made a different choice. Save. A different choice. Save. A different choice. Then maybe so would you.

I made so many choices.

But it never changed the outcome.

I wonder if they mean anything?

Probably not. They are just dreams after all.


	4. Letter 4: Object Permanence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conservation of mass dictates that matter can not be created or destroyed. Not even death can defy that.

Letter 4

You know, I don’t think we humans are as good at this whole ‘object permanence thing’ as we like to believe. We can never truly convince ourselves that things that capitol ‘M’ Matter exist outside of our awareness of them. Nowhere is it more clearly demonstrated then when something that Matters is taken from us. When we suffer a sudden and abhorrent loss, we cannot comprehend the idea that Matter obeys that fundamental law as all matter must. It cannot be destroyed. That Existence so transcends existence, even when we believe something that Matters has been taken from us it continues to Be.

Death is not a transformation into unbeing, it is a movement from one room to another, and we who are left behind cannot fathom that someone is simply in the next room over because what we believe exists is only what is readily in front of us.

Every embrace we shared left an imprint of you on my skin that sank down to the bone, into the cells, until my DNA can recall the memory. It has been five years since you held me, and every cell you ever touched is dead but I can still feel your arms sometimes. The phantom weight of you is so ingrained within me. I can hear your voice in my ears. When the world is quiet, I hear you speak in beats. _Thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thump._

Maybe one day, I will stop crying when you cover your face, because I know you are not really gone, only in the next room over.


	5. Letter 5: A Moment in Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some moments are never forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: More intense discussion of suicide than other chapters.

Letter 5

I remember that day in the sort of crystal clear, graphic detail only trauma can bring. It was, after all, the amputation of an emotional limb, I can still feel the phantom weight of it each time I try to reach out to the world around me and am reminded of its loss.

My phone was heavier than the shell casing bouncing off the ground in your room, but the voice on the line is just as deafening as a gunshot. It is words that fragment themselves in my skull not metal, but every nerve in my body screams with the same pain signal until they are smothered and silenced by shock. In a millisecond I go from excruciating pain to utterly numb. My ears ring, and I feel I am choking. My brain has stopped working after all, and so my lungs and heart have as well.

Is this what it was like for you? Sudden, blinding agony that bled into nothing?

Suicide, I have learned, is not simply the act of killing one’s self, but the genocide of an individual. With that single bullet you wiped out not only yourself, but all the potential you’s there could ever have been. All the you’s that existed within all the people who loved you, and all the you’s those people shared with so many others, stopped breathing in the same moment. Every day I perform CPR on the you that is still within me, and since there is not higher care of a memory I will have to continue until I stop breathing.

I hope that when I do, the people around me will continue for both our sakes.


End file.
